NeighborWorks America, a nonprofit created by Congress to support community revitalization, has donated $675,000 over the last two years that the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the Center for Planning Excellence and other partners have leveraged into $2.5 million to improve Old South Baton Rouge, officials said today. That money has gone to home and business rehabilitation, home ownership counseling, and predevelopment work in eight target areas. But much work remains to turn around the blight-ridden area between LSU and downtown.
“While I’m not shouting [with joy] yet, I am smiling,” Metro Councilwoman Tara Wicker says. “People are tired of going to meetings. They’re tired of talking about the progress. It’s time to move this thing forward and get some things done.”
Clearing titles is one of the biggest obstacles to development in Old South Baton Rouge. Noel James is a project manager with Gulf Coast Housing Partnership, which has been working for two years just to clear titles and assemble 20 to 25 parcels for an Old South gateway project at Highland Road and Terrace Avenue. James said one parcel had more than 400 heirs. James says Gulf Coast would like to start construction sometime next year; as envisioned, phase one would include 54 condos, half market rate, half affordable, and about 4,000 square feet of retail.
The East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority is working on a streamlined process to clear titles on large numbers of underutilized properties all at once, so that those properties can be converted into larger parcels for meaningful development. Today, a developer trying to clear titles on properties one at a time could easily spend more on legal fees than the land is worth.
“This is another part of our problem: landlords who don’t do anything with their properties,” says CPEX redevelopment director Susan Ludwig, who led a bus tour of Old South today. Ludwig was pointing at a couple of boarded-up houses along Thomas Delpit Drive, which is one of the area’s most important streets. BRAF vice president John Spain says the city is starting to beef up code enforcement, which will provide a tool to take action against such absentee landlords.
BRAF says more than $150 million has been invested in Old South in the past decade, including new condos and apartments near LSU, a new library, a Head Start center and a community center. The parks system has revamped City Park, and an $18.6 million federal HOPE VI grant has replaced housing projects with single-family homes, although only 48 houses were built, not the 127 officials originally hoped for.
“We just need a couple hundred more,” Spain says. For a Business Report cover story on efforts to revitalize Old South Baton Rouge, click here.
